A Writing Prompt on Mother’s Day
The writing prompt for this week is to write about a feature of someone’s body that seems contrary to the inner essence of that person. You can use this for creative nonfiction or fiction. Imagine the way that feature would be if the person had lived the life they should have lived. As an example,…
Read MoreComing Home: A Writing Prompt
I start today with these lines from Robert Frost’s narrative poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. We know this isn’t always true. Families turn their own away all the time, and sometimes for good reason. In a…
Read MorePet Peeves: Story Starters
We all have them, our pet peeves that raise our blood pressure and put us on edge. Here are a few of mine: overpriced restaurants that crowd tables together so you actually feel like you’re dining with the people on your left and right, noisy restaurants where you have to shout to carry on a…
Read MoreSuccess Comes in Many Ways: A Wish for My Students
I’m approaching the end of another school year. Right now, I’m in the midst of reading the wonderful revisions my fiction and creative nonfiction writers have done. It’s a time to celebrate the victories each writer has had as they’ve moved their original drafts further along and a time for me to make any suggestions…
Read MoreAnd Then It Happened: A Story Prompt
You know how it goes. You’re going through an ordinary day—maybe it’s a Sunday, and you’re just taking it easy—and then just like that something happens to change everything. Maybe a visitor arrives, or a phone call comes, or someone says something they’ve been repressing, or they do something they never thought they’d do. The…
Read MoreIt Takes So Little
After I graduated from high school, I enrolled in the local community college. The girl I was dating at the time had an older sister who’d also gone there, and she gave me some of the textbooks she’d used. I remember a psychology text and a literature anthology. The latter was still in use at…
Read MoreForgiveness
My memories of childhood Easters are mostly of coloring the eggs my mother would then hide for me to find on Sunday mornings. We lived on our farm, then, which means I’d yet to enter third grade, and we’d yet to move to Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. Each year, while we…
Read MoreMemory as Resurrection: A Writing Activity
Cathy and I have had an odd feeling after selling her family home. She still tears up from time to time when she realizes our attachment to our native land has just become a bit less firm. For the past nine years, she’s been in that home four days out of each month, as she…
Read MoreHousecleaning: Lessons for Writers
I spent last week—my spring break week—helping Cathy clean out her family home in Illinois, so she could close the sale on Friday. We arrived on Monday evening and had three days to get the job done. We had a lot of help from family members, for which we’re grateful. All the loading of furniture,…
Read MoreUnder Pressure: A Writing Prompt
There comes a time when writers are overwhelmed either by the circumstances of their personal lives, their jobs, or the challenges of the writing itself. Today, I’m thinking particularly of those of us who teach because, as is usually the case this time of year, I’m swamped. I won’t list everything I have to do—after…
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